bulk

How to bulk download Youtube videos from playlists or channels (Windows, Mac, and Linux).


Update: (2015-07-07) BYTubeD no longer seems to be working (making this post obsolete). A fantastic replacement however is youtube-dl. Please click this link to find the download links for youtube-dl along with basic info on the software.

While many programs have been created to help you download Youtube videos, most of these programs do not allow you to download an entire Youtube channel or playlist.
It turns out that doing this is actually quite easy and only requires a browser you most likely already have (Firefox) and a couple of add-ons (BYTubeD and DownThemAll). Because Firefox is cross platform compatible, this means you can do this in any OS (which is great for people like me who use Linux).
If you do not already have Firefox, go ahead and download it. After you have Firefox running go to the download page for BYTubeD and download and install the add-on.

I should note that at the time of this writing (2014-11-19) the website says the extension is discontinued and may not work. It is currently working fine but of course there is always the possibility that this may not work in the future.
After you have installed BYTubeD, you will need to go to your Firefox Add-Ons (Ctrl+Shift+A) and download and install DownThemAll! You can find it by doing a search for "DownThemAll" in the search bar.


With these two Add-ons installed, you are ready to download. Go to the Youtube page or channel you would like to download videos from.

Select either "Videos" (to download all the videos in the channel) or "Playlists" to download only the videos in the playlist.

I will use my Youtube channel from my English teaching website Super English Kid for an example.

Once you have clicked on the playlist link you will see a page like this. The playlist will default and start playing the first video in the playlist. We don't want this. Make sure you click on the playlist name on the top right corner to go to the page with ONLY the playlist videos.


When you are on the playlist page you can right click on the screen and select the BYTubeD option.


The BYTubeD add-on gives you many options that are labeled in the program so I will not go into details. Basically you just select the video format and quality and make sure that in the "What to do?" drop down menu you select "Generate Links." This is not absolutely necessary but it will make your life easier and ensure that you can download the video files without errors or incomplete downloads.


After you press the "Start" button, BYTubeD will generate a new page for you with all of the video file links. On this page you will want to right click again and select DownThemAll!...


Select all of the files and your download location then press the "Start!" button.


That is it. You are done. Now you just wait for the downloads to finish. The great thing about using DownThemAll is that if you have a spotty or slow internet connection (like me in China) then you can resume the downloads even if there are timeouts or server errors. 

About McKay

18 comments:

  1. If you are a Mac user you can easily do this with Airy: http://mac.eltima.com/youtube-downloader-mac.html

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  2. BYTubeD is not working anymore... What is an alternative?

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    Replies
    1. You are right... thank for the info. I am going to start looking into an alternative. I have been looking for a while but have not had any luck. I will reply to you (and probably update this post) if I can find an alternative.

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    2. Good news! I found a solution. Youtube-dl works! I am using it now. I will probably do a tutorial on this soon. In the meantime here is the download link for youtube-dl and here is the download link for a GUI for youtube-dl.

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    3. I'd recommend acethinker video downloader to you, my favorite choice to download YouTube videos. It is a free cloud based software to download videos without install any software in your pc.

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  3. Plz come up with an new alternative bytubed is not working any more

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Good news! I found a solution. Youtube-dl works! I am using it now. I will probably do a tutorial on this soon. In the meantime here is the download link for youtube-dl and here is the download link for a GUI for youtube-dl.

      Delete
  4. I would like to share tutorials about downloading youtube video using vlc with step by step .

    I will happy if you visit my article and write a comment . thanks

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  5. BYTubeD is working.
    https://github.com/dieterds/bytubed

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  6. Or Just add VD to the youtube link,there is also VDYoutube.com that offers good services to download all format from youtube by just adding vd and most famous website like facebook, twitter, vimeo, vk and so on

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  7. I realize this is an old article now, and some of the methods above may not work. I'm using the Mac version of Tubulator for this; a Windows version is available too. Tubulator downloads audio as MP3 as well. https://www.tubulatorapp.com

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  8. I'm using Youdownloader by https://youdownloader.net/ to download videos from Youtube for free.

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  9. Tubemate is also an application that supports downloading videos from Youtube. Currently Tubemate has version for Firefox browser. You can install Tubemate here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tubemate/

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